The present disclosure relates to computer systems, and, more specifically, to virtual machine (VM) live migration.
A VM is a software implementation of a machine (i.e., a computer) that executes computer programs. A VM typically emulates a physical computing environment, with requests for central processing unit (CPU), memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources being managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware. VMs are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. System migrations of VMs are performed for a variety of reasons, including the ability to provide a back-up system while hardware and/or software upgrades are being installed. System migrations are also performed to move the VM to a new processor or other hardware. There are a variety of methods for performing the migration including halting execution of the VM to perform the migration, and performing a live migration which migrates a VM while it is executing. Live VM migration is often desired by companies with mission critical systems.
VM migration is often bounded by the time that it takes to migrate the state of a VM over a migration network link. The migration network is often a dedicated network, or it may be a prior service/operations dedicated network not used for corporate data.